Mass HD Video Storage Solutions

I am trying to decide how I should go about choosing a storage solution for large amounts of HD video in a new editing studio we are building.
An xServe is already a definite purchase because we like the scheduling abilities for company resources in iCal, and would also like our Mail in house. That...and we are Mac fans.
Our real concern and my question here is this. What would you suggest our answer to storing all of our HD video be. We would like to keep an archive of all our raw video coming off of the cameras, but realize how many TBs we will be looking at.
We will be recording around 40 hours of HD video per week and over time this number will continue to grow. You can see how many TBs of video we will be building up. Until now we have been burning all of our archives to BluRay but we would like for our video to be searchable and more accessible.
What is the best mass storage solution without being ridiculously expensive? (although we realize expensive may be the answer to our problem)
Cost aside, what would be the best storage solution to purchase. We were looking at the Promise RAID. We figured it would be smarter to purchase a mass RAID array instead of continuing to purchase multiple xServes whose capacity max out at 6TB.
Also, what are the strengths of adding XSAN to the mixture?
Thank you all in advance for your help.

Your Vixia shoots AVCHD, and while not uncompressed HD (230 MB/s), it will need to be trans-coded into ProRes (17-18 MB/s) for you to edit it in Final Cut which will take up some space. I use AVCHD a lot, and at 1920x1080 @29.97 you'll need about 65GB per hour of trans-coded ProRes footage. If you can get away with ProRes LT or Proxy, you will make it even easier on yourself.
If you have to have all of your footage available for editing this will come at a premium as disk space is more expensive than storing to tape. You mentioned you'll be recording 40 hours per week; at that rate you will need have some sort of archive solution or a massive budget to keep it all on spinning disks.
In the end though, it all still comes down to what your requirements are for editing. Do you have one editor or ten? How many video streams will they need to be able to edit at one time? If it's more than about two (3-4 is pretty typical) and you have more than 2-3 editors, you are rapidly heading for Xsan land. And a big one at that. A basic Xsan with a couple of Promise RAIDs can cost $75,000 or more.
You could get a number of Promise chassis and daisy chain them together using SAS, but this won't scale beyond five units, and your total bandwidth will be limited by the single fibre RAID controller they are all connected to at the top.
If you are on a budget you might want to look at something like this:
http://maxxdigital.com/shop/index.php?cPath=137
They daisy-chain together using SAS. If you connect the head unit to an Xserve using SAS as well, you can then share out your data using Gigabit ethernet, or if you have the budget, 10GigE which is fast enough to edit several streams of ProRes. Maxx has a popular system called Final Share that will allow you to get a lot of data out to several edit stations fairly affordably.
http://maxxdigital.com/shop/index.php?cPath=117
JM

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    Report
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